An evening exploring what home means, how we hold onto it, and how we carry it with us when we have to leave, with music by Reena Esmail, Bushra El-Turk, Lembit Beecher, Piazzolla, Vaughan Williams and Copland. Part of CLS’s wider season exploring asylum and migration in the UK.
This concert was born from a year of conversations in a community kitchen, between musicians and people who are seeking asylum in the UK, about the memories of people, places and lives they had left behind and their hopes for the future they are building. Scents and sounds so evocative and distinct that they conjure us through time, space and memory to a particular place.
The musical programme moves across continents, borders and centuries. Reena Esmail writes from the meeting-point of Indian and Western classical traditions. Bushra el-Turk draws on her Lebanese heritage. Lembit Beecher gives life to his Estonian grandmother in five luminous minutes of string quartet. Piazzolla evokes Buenos Aires in a single, heartbroken melody. Vaughan Williams reaches into the English folk tradition for something ancient and aching. And Copland’s Appalachian Spring distils an entire American spirit; pioneering, optimistic and alive with hope.
It feels fitting that this evening takes place at Wilton’s Music Hall, off Cable Street; a place with its own deep history of community, resistance and refuge.
With a performance interweaving orchestral music with words and stories, this is an evening that asks what binds us to a place — and to each other.